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VOX-Pol Blog Post.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

VOX-Pol’s new report presents findings from the REASSURE (Researcher, Security, Safety, and Resilience) project’s in-depth interviews with 39 online extremism and terrorism researchers. Based at universities, research institutes, and think tanks in Europe and North America, the interviewees studied mainly, albeit not exclusively, far-right and violent jihadist online activity. The report catalogues for the first time the range of harms they have experienced, the lack of formalised systems of care or training, and their reliance therefore on informal support networks to mitigate those harms.

This study explores how terrorists use financial technologies in their plots. Using a database of 231 US-based Islamic State actors, it analyses how they move money and make purchases, as well as whether the use of technology affects success. Fundamentally, terrorists opt for simplicity; there is little evidence of sophisticated financial plots. Terrorists tend to use the Internet in two ways: to make purchases and to coordinate transactions. Transactions via Money Service Businesses are more likely to be part of successful plots. Finally, the paper discusses factors which explain this simplicity as well as discussing whether this may change moving forward.

This article seeks to re-ontologize online radicalization. Individuals becoming terrorists after being exposed to online content have become a prescient concern for academics, policy makers, and journalists. Existing theoretical contributions to the concept have assumed that there are two ontological domains—online and offline—that can be meaningfully separated. This article will draw from several arguments from other fields which critique this position; the contemporary information environment enmeshes the two inseparably. This argument is then advanced to demonstrate that online radicalization is a redundant concept by drawing on empirical research as well as recent case studies of terrorism. Instead, scholars should consider holistic theories which account for a range of other factors beyond online communication technologies.

This study offers an empirical insight into terrorists’ use of the Internet. Although criminology has previously been quiet on this topic, behavior‐based studies can aid in understanding the interactions between terrorists and their environments. Using a database of 231 US‐based Islamic State terrorists, four important findings are offered: (1) This cohort utilized the Internet heavily for the purposes of both networking with co‐ideologues and learning about their intended activity. (2) There is little reason to believe that these online interactions are replacing offline ones, as has previously been suggested. Rather, terrorists tend to operate in both domains. (3) Online activity seems to be similar across the sample, regardless of the number of co‐offenders or the sophistication of attack. (4) There is reason to believe that using the Internet may be an impediment to terrorists’ success.